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This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the degree of co-movement among the nominal price returns of 11 major energy, agricultural, and food commodities using monthly data between 1970 and 2013. The authors study the extent and the time evolution of unconditional and conditional correlations using a uniform-spacings testing approach, a multivariate dynamic conditional correlation model and a rolling regression procedure.

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of volatility between the corn, wheat, and soybean markets in the United States. Volatility interactions across markets, if they exist, may lower the effectiveness of diversification strategies to mitigate price risks and should be taken into account when analyzing the pricing behavior of different agricultural commodities. We follow a Multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (MGARCH) approach to evaluate the level of interdependence and volatility transmission across these major crops on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

This 2013 Global Food Policy Report is the third in an annual series that provides an in-depth look at major food policy developments and events. Initiated in response to resurgent interest in food and nutrition security, the series offers a yearly overview of the food policy developments that have contributed to or hindered progress in achieving food and nutrition security. It reviews what happened in food policy and why, examines key challenges and opportunities, shares new evidence and knowledge, and highlights emerging issues.

This 2013 Global Food Policy Report is the third in an annual series that provides an in-depth look at major food policy developments and events. Initiated in response to resurgent interest in food and nutrition security, the series offers a yearly overview of the food policy developments that have contributed to or hindered progress in achieving food and nutrition security. It reviews what happened in food policy and why, examines key challenges and opportunities, shares new evidence and knowledge, and highlights emerging issues

The current El Niño episode may be among the strongest on record (Earth Institute 2015). This year again, serious localized production shortfalls have occurred or are expected, creating an urgent need for policy actions to ensure adequate food supply and food mobility from surplus to deficit regions. Although global cereal production is not expected to decline significantly, complacency is not warranted: The situation calls for careful monitoring of production and prices, promotion of transparent international and domestic trade policies, and expanded coverage of safety nets and nutrition programs for the households most severely affected, all while working toward long-term improvements in resilience and agricultural production.

“An urgent and at times terrifying dispatch from a distinguished reporter who has given heart and soul to his subject.”—Hampton Sides

In The End of Plenty, award-winning environmental journalist Joel K. Bourne Jr. puts our fight against devastating world hunger in dramatic perspective. He travels the globe to introduce a new generation of farmers and scientists on the front lines of the next green revolution. He visits corporate farmers trying to restore Ukraine as Europe's breadbasket, a Canadian aquaculturist, the agronomist behind the world's largest organic sugarcane plantation, and many other extraordinary farmers, large and small, who are racing to stave off catastrophe as climate change disrupts food production worldwide.

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year and a Finalist for the PEN / E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.

Biotech companies are creating designer crops with strange powers-from cholesterol-reducing soybeans to tobacco plants that act as solar-powered pharmaceutical factories. They promise great benefits: better health for consumers and more productive agriculture. But the vision has a dark side. In Lords of the Harvest, Daniel Charles tells the real story behind "Frankenstein foods"-the story you won't hear from the biotech companies or their fiercest opponents. He reveals for the first time the cutthroat scientific competition and backroom business deals that led to the first genetically engineered foods. And he exposes the secrets of campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic aimed at bringing down the biotech industry. A riveting tale of boundless ambition, political intrigue, and the quest for knowledge, Lords of the Harvest is ultimately a story of idealism and conflicting dreams about the shape of a better world.

Through a combination of field work and archival research, Kenichi Matsui offers an original and pioneering overview of the evolution of water law and agricultural policies in the Canadian west. By incorporating the history of water law philosophies, water development technologies, agricultural policies, and cross-cultural theories, Matsui constructs an interdisciplinary analysis of how both Native peoples and non-native stakeholders struggled for better rights and livelihood through litigation, political campaigns, and direct actions.

During the early decades of the 20th century, agricultural practice in America was transformed from a pre-industrial to an industrial activity. In this study Deborah Fitzgerald argues that farms became modernised in the 1920s because they adopted not only new machinery but also the financial, cultural and ideological apparatus of industrialism. Fitzgerald examines how bankers and emerging professionals in engineering and economics pushed for systematic, businesslike farming. She discusses how factory practices served as a template for the creation across the country of industrial or corporate farms. She also looks at how farming was affected by this revolution and concludes by following several agricultural enthusiasts to the Soviet Union, where the lessons of industrial farming were studied.

"The courage of a book, it has been said, is that it looks away from nothing. Here is a brave book." ―The Charlotte Observer

"Berry says that these recent essays mostly say again what he has said before. His faithful readers may think he hasn't, however, said any of it better before." ―Booklist (starred review)

"His refusal to abandon the local for the global, to sacrifice neighborliness, community integrity, and economic diversity for access to Wal-Mart, has never seemed more appealing, nor his questions of personal accountability more powerful." ―Kirkus Reviews

There are those in America today who seem to feel we must audition for our citizenship, with "patriot" offered as the badge for those found narrowly worthy. Let this book stand as Wendell Berry's application, for he is one of those faithful, devoted critics envisioned by the Founding Fathers to be the life's blood and very future of the nation they imagined. Citizenship Papers collects nineteen new essays, from celebrations of exemplary lives to critiques of American life, including "A Citizen's Response [to the new National Security Strategy]"—a ringing call of caution to a nation standing on the brink of global catastrophe.

Forty-nine million people—including one in four children—go hungry in the U.S. every day, despite our having the means to provide nutritious, affordable food for all. Inspired by the acclaimed documentary A Place at the Table, this companion book offers powerful insights from those at the front lines of solving hunger in America, including:

Jeff Bridges, Academy Award–winning actor, cofounder of the End Hunger Network, and spokesperson for the No Kid Hungry Campaign, on raising awareness about hungerKen Cook, president of Environmental Working Group, unravels the inequities in the Farm Bill and shows how they affect America's hunger crisisMarion Nestle, nutritionist and acclaimed critic of the food industry, whose latest work tracks the explosion of calories in today's “Eat More” environmentBill Shore, Joel Berg, and Robert Egger, widely-published anti-hunger activists, suggest bold and diverse strategies for solving the crisisJanet Poppendieck, sociologist, bestselling author, and well-known historian of poverty and hunger in America, argues the case for school lunch reformJennifer Harris, of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, uncovers the new hidden persuaders of web food advertisersDavid Beckmann, head of Bread for the World, and Sarah Newman, researcher on A Place at the Table, explore the intersection of faith and feeding the hungryMariana Chilton, director of Drexel University's Center for Hunger-Free Communities, discusses the health impacts of hunger and the groundbreaking Witnesses to Hunger projectTom Colicchio, chef and executive producer of television's Top Chef, presents his down-to-earth case to Washington for increases in child nutrition programsAndy Fisher, veteran activist in community food projects, argues persuasively why we have to move beyond the charity-based emergency feeding programKelly Meyer, cofounder of Teaching Gardens, illuminates the path to educating, and providing healthy food for, all childrenKristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, the film's directors/producers, tell their personal stories of how and why they came to make the documentary

Hunger and food insecurity pose a deep threat to our nation. A Place at the Table shows they can be solved once and for all, if the American public decides—as they have in the past—that making healthy food available, and affordable, is in the best interest of us all.

Popularized by Michael Pollan in his best-selling In Defense of Food, Gyorgy Scrinis’s concept of nutritionism refers to the reductive understanding of nutrients as the key indicators of healthy food—an approach that has dominated nutrition science, dietary advice, and food marketing. Scrinis argues this ideology has narrowed and in some cases distorted our appreciation of food quality, such that even highly processed foods may be perceived as healthful depending on their content of “good” or “bad” nutrients. Investigating the butter versus margarine debate, the battle between low-fat, low-carb, and other weight-loss diets, and the food industry’s strategic promotion of nutritionally enhanced foods, Scrinis reveals the scientific, social, and economic factors driving our modern fascination with nutrition. Scrinis develops an original framework and terminology for analyzing the characteristics and consequences of nutritionism since the late nineteenth century. He begins with the era of quantification, in which the idea of protective nutrients, caloric reductionism, and vitamins’ curative effects took shape. He follows with the era of good and bad nutritionism, which set nutricentric dietary guidelines and defined the parameters of unhealthy nutrients; and concludes with our current era of functional nutritionism, in which the focus has shifted to targeted nutrients, superfoods, and optimal diets. Scrinis’s research underscores the critical role of nutrition science and dietary advice in shaping our relationship to food and our bodies and in heightening our nutritional anxieties. He ultimately shows how nutritionism has aligned the demands and perceived needs of consumers with the commercial interests of food manufacturers and corporations. Scrinis also offers an alternative paradigm for assessing the healthfulness of foods—the food quality paradigm—that privileges food production and processing quality, cultural-traditional knowledge, and sensual-practical experience, and promotes less reductive forms of nutrition research and dietary advice.

This book deals with an important and timely issue: the political and economic forces that have shaped agricultural policies in the United States during the past eighty years. It explores the complex interactions of class, market, and state as they have affected the formulation and application of agricultural policy decisions since the New Deal, showing how divisions and coalitions within Southern, Corn Belt, and Wheat Belt agriculture were central to the ebb and flow of price supports and production controls. In addition, the book highlights the roles played by the world economy, the civil rights movement, and existing national policy to provide an invaluable analysis of past and recent trends in supply management policy.

Transatlantic Food and Agricultural Trade Policy traces the past fifty years of transatlantic trade relations in the area of food and agricultural policy, from early skirmishes over chicken exports to ongoing conflicts over biotech foods and hormone us

In a perfect storm, the environment, the global economic system and geopolitics are all undergoing rapid, uncontrolled change. In the same way that the climate is in a state of flux, exhibiting erratic behavior before settling into a new norm, in the wake of the global economic crisis, many of the assumptions about the Western economic system have been destroyed, which leads to some troubling questions:

How aggressive will water-hungry China become in order to secure a sufficient supply of it?

What will happen when climate-triggered conflicts like the one in Sudan spread throughout the continent?

As India takes its proper place at the high table of nations and begins large-scale importing of food, what will happen to already shrinking supplies?

Global Warring takes a hard look at these questions. Journalist and analyst Cleo Paskal identifies problem areas that are most likely to start wars, destroy economies and create failed states. Examining the most likely environmental change scenarios, she illuminates the ways in which they could radically alter human existence. A fascinating tour through our uncertain future, Global Warring also offers a controversial new way forward for the global economy and the worldwide environmental crisis.

The papers in this volume provide much needed focus and in depth coverage of the effect of income-volatility on the participation and design of food-assistance programs such as the Food Stamp Program and the National School Lunch Program.

"Uses recently declassified sources to trace the successes and limitations of the Johnson administration's efforts to use food aid as a diplomatic tool during the Cold War, both to gain support for U.S. policies and to reward or punish allies such as Israel, India, and South Vietnam"--Provided by publisher.

As the nineteenth century ended in Hunt County, Texas, a way of life was dying. The tightly knit, fiercely independent society of the yeomen farmers--"plain folk," as historians have often dubbed them--was being swallowed up by the rising tide of a rapidly changing, cotton-based economy. A social network based on family, religion, and community was falling prey to crippling debt and resulting loss of land ownership. For many of the rural people of Hunt County and similar places, it seemed like the end of the world. In Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists historian Kyle G. Wilkison analyzes the patterns of plain-folk life and the changes that occurred during the critical four decades spanning the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Political protest evolved in the wake of the devastating losses experienced by the poor rural majority, and Wilkison carefully explores the interplay of religion and politics as Greenbackers, Populists, and Socialists vied for the support of the dispossessed tenant farmers and sharecroppers. With its richly drawn contextualization and analysis of the causes and effects of the epochal shifts in plain-folk society, Kyle G. Wilkison's Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists will reward students and scholars in economic, regional, and agricultural history.

In the mid-1990s, as many as one million North Koreans died in one of the worst famines of the twentieth century. The socialist food distribution system collapsed primarily because of a misguided push for self-reliance, but was compounded by the regime's failure to formulate a quick response-including the blocking of desperately needed humanitarian relief.

As households, enterprises, local party organs, and military units tried to cope with the economic collapse, a grassroots process of marketization took root. However, rather than embracing these changes, the North Korean regime opted for tentative economic reforms with ambiguous benefits and a self-destructive foreign policy. As a result, a chronic food shortage continues to plague North Korea today.

In their carefully researched book, Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland present the most comprehensive and penetrating account of the famine to date, examining not only the origins and aftermath of the crisis but also the regime's response to outside aid and the effect of its current policies on the country's economic future. Their study begins by considering the root causes of the famine, weighing the effects of the decline in the availability of food against its poor distribution. Then it takes a close look at the aid effort, addressing the difficulty of monitoring assistance within the country, and concludes with an analysis of current economic reforms and strategies of engagement.

North Korea's famine exemplified the depredations that can arise from tyrannical rule and the dilemmas such regimes pose for the humanitarian community, as well as the obstacles inherent in achieving economic and political reform. To reveal the state's culpability in this tragic event is a vital project of historical recovery, one that is especially critical in light of our current engagement with the "North Korean question."

On Agricultural Prosperity takes the best thoughts that history and philosophy have offered and makes them relevant to the present day rural context.

Written in a simple illustrative style, On Agricultural Prosperity explains the core forces that act against rural profit and disproves the solutions that are promoted by the incumbent political dialogue, before providing a true solution that adheres to the rules of prosperity, which have been unchanged for 3,000 years.

On Agricultural Prosperity is a key piece of strategic thinking, based on a unique resource, aimed at putting the solution to rural profit directly into the hands of farmers. As such, it is an essential read for those farmers seeking to put the viability of their rural business into their own hands.